Robert Boenig, C. S.
Lewis and the Middle Ages (Kent, OH, 2012).
Viii + 181 pages. ISBN:
9781606351147.
Norman Cantor, in Inventing the Middle Ages (1991), takes
an outsider perspective on the careers of C. S. Lewis and J. R. R. Tolkien,
painting them as nostalgic for the zenith of the British Empire, and seeing
their primary importance to medieval studies as their fiction. Robert Boening, by contrast, takes an
engaging insider’s view of C. S. Lewis’s personal and professional relationship
to the medieval world.
Boenig’s introductory overview
attempts in miniature what Cantor attempts in a mid-length volume, and does an
excellent job of explaining the milieu of medieval studies from the
mid-sixteenth century to the middle of the twentieth, to contextualize Lewis’s
career. His description of the initial
interest in the Middle Ages by the early English Reformers (resulting in the
preservation of many Anglo-Saxon and Middle English texts) connects Lewis’s
religious concerns to the field of medieval studies itself. His explanation of the roots of the current
academic discipline—its origin in Victorian cultural and literary fashion, and
the political appropriation of the Middle Ages by some of the authors Lewis
appreciates (especially William Morris)—contextualizes not only Lewis, but also
the vogue for medievalism that animated Lewis’s early reading.
Chapter one, “Lewis the
Medievalist,” focuses on Lewis’s academic career and activities relating to the
Middle Ages. The point of the chapter can
be summed up by saying that Lewis’s scholarship attempted to colonize the Renaissance
with the Middle Ages. Boenig makes the
case that Lewis found a great worldview affinity with the Middle Ages, and took
as his scholarly project the contemporary explanation of the worldview itself
for his contemporary audience, showing the interpenetration of the Renaissance
with medieval modes of thought and literary expression.
The subsequent chapters connect
Lewis’s understanding of the medieval worldview with his notion of Joy, and
with both the images and structures of his fiction. One of the most fruitful insights of these
chapters is that Lewis conceived of medieval creativity as dialogic, in which an
author appropriates and remakes prior texts.
One sees this most easily in such works by Lewis as The Pilgrim’s Regress and The
Great Divorce, but Boenig makes the case that medieval modes of creativity
permeate Lewis’s creative writing in a variety of ways, which he describes in
detail.
The comprehensive discussion of
this mode of medieval creativity provides the reader with an important support for
the arguments of Michael Ward’s Planet
Narnia; one problematic element of Ward’s argument involves his assertion
that the medieval cosmological pattern that he sees was intended by Lewis. Since Ward himself makes the point that Lewis
never explicitly mentioned such a pattern, one might ask whether the pattern
resides in the mind of the reader only, rather than the author’s intention. Boenig’s discussion provides a context to
argue that Lewis’s mode of creativity could easily accommodate an implicit
“dialogue” between Lewis and medieval cosmology in terms of his Narnian fantasy
world.
The book is well-structured and
written, engaging to both the layperson and the academic with an interest in
Lewis. It paints an excellent portrait
of Lewis as a medievalist and an appreciator of the period. Boenig’s conclusions and analyses are
fruitful to further scholarship on Lewis’s relationship to the medieval period
and are interesting in themselves, making this volume well worth reading.
